Abstract
Despite the well-established findings regarding the negative effect of impostor phenomenon (IP) on individuals’ career development, we know little about its underlying mechanism. It is also unclear whether IP differentially affects the way men and women manage their careers. Drawn upon ego depletion theory, we explored the relationship among IP, gender, ego depletion, and career preparatory activities via an experiment and a two-wave survey conducted in China. The results showed that the negative relationship between IP and career preparatory activities was mediated by ego depletion. We further found that gender moderated the indirect effect of IP on career preparatory activities via ego depletion, and this effect was stronger for women than men. Based on these new findings, some theoretical and practical implications were discussed.
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The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Notes
We are not the first to prime trait and examine its follow-up cognitive process in the experiment (e.g., Wheeler et al., 2008), and the prime of trait is workable based on empirical findings in neuroscience. According to the literature review conducted by Klein (2012), an autobiographical task asks participants to search memory for a personal experience in which they had manifested a specific trait. This could activate and access self-relevant knowledge from episodic memory, providing contents for the perceived self. By this way, this task could prime participants’ self-perceptions and the relevant trait in a moment, which could influence follow-up cognitive process temporarily (Klein, 2012).
It should be noted that our prime manipulation did not create the IP trait in and of itself, but made it more salient by activating participants’ IP-relevant episodic memory. Although this prime effect cannot be stable across time and situations, it can last for a short period of time. We expect that the primed IP trait might increase individuals’ ego depletion level due to the induced emotion regulation within minutes in the experiment.
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This research was funded by the Department of Education of Guangdong Province, China [grant number 2020GXJK094].
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Li, H., Ngo, Hy. Impostor phenomenon and career preparatory activities: testing ego depletion as mediator and gender as moderator. Curr Psychol 43, 2442–2452 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04493-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04493-5